Freaks Like Me

Personal Growth

This time, it was an audience enjoying a comedy in a movie theater in Louisiana. Another mass shooting in another public place, here in the United States - adding to the long list of 2015 mass shootings in America. Many were wounded, and three lives ended, including the gunman. But the rest of us are all stuck in a cul-de-sac in this country, and none of us has the solution by ourselves.

"I did not fast during Ramadan. But I did somehow experience a little bit of the meaning of the Muslim holy month that just ended a few days ago. The ebb and flow of the fast days was in my consciousness. The daily hunger and the spiritual uplift of the faithful were on my mind. I learned a tiny bit about the meaning of this month, about being conditioned through the fast to feel empathy for the poor who don’t have enough to eat.

"In the midst of a very eventful summer for the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently found that she'd unexpectedly gone viral on YouTube. During Merkel's otherwise pedestrian TV appearance on Good Living in Germany, a 13-year-old Palestinian refugee named Reem asked a heartbreaking question about facing deportation from Germany to her native Lebanon. When Merkel noticed the girl cry, she reached out to console her, saying that she'd done well.

This week, the NASA spacecraft New Horizons sent back pictures of Pluto which were stunning in their beauty and surprising in what they revealed. Rabbi Brad Hirschfield give us four reasons these photos may fill us with awe. For more, watch the Faith on the Record video below.

"Nathan Hale had only one life to give for his country, but almost 250 years after his death, there's still plenty of Nathan Hale to go around, and that has upset a Yale-educated author a great deal. Let me explain. As a gift to university supporters, the Yale University class of 1975 recently offered a Nathan Hale bobblehead, a replica of a large bronze statue on the New Haven campus.

"You’re sitting in an armchair,
it’s your favorite, though
beat up from years of use,
and there is a tear in the fabric
covering the seat cushion, and
it’s after noon, and you’re taking
your nap, and you..."

For more... By Janet R. Kirchheimer from On Bearings Collegeville Institute For Ecumenical Studies

"...We Jews, however we understand ourselves and our Jewishness, are more integrally linked to the larger American culture in which we live than perhaps any previous generation of diaspora Jews, including past generations of American Jews. We are, like it or not, fully at home here. This is not some 21st-century version of Germany in the early 20th century, or a variation on Spain in the 12th. It's not even that I don't believe in Israel.

In life, we all know the ends shouldn't justify the means. But let's not invert that, either. In Vienna, as we pass another deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, U.S. officials are praising their productive negotiations - with little to show for it: "The reason to successfully come to some arrangement between the various countries is not to validate the process and justify the expenditure of time; it's to create peaceful relations between potentially warring nations." For more, watch the Faith on the Record video below.

Hosted by Joe Concha along with panelists Rick Unger, Carl Higbie and Brad Hirschfield, issues of the day are explored.

Has Trump changed the immigration debate? Fireworks fly in Congress over the Confederate Flag. Are State Subsidized Sex Changes for Oregon Teens a Good Idea? Advanced Care Planning — Is it life-affirming or a death panel?...and more.

"It's much more fun and easy to imagine the good and positive things that can happen. There's a whole industry advancing "positive thinking" and "visualizing success." However, if we focus exclusively on why we're so right and so good and so smart, then when things do go wrong, we may not know how to respond."